How one marketing expert rose to the C-suite of a major Atlanta hotel firm
Heather Balsley’s first job was working as a poultry butcher at a farmer’s market.
It was “a great formative experience to learn how a small business operates, learn customer service and that balance of hard work and discipline and fitting that into everything else that was going on in my life as a teenager.”
Now, Balsley is the global chief commercial and marketing officer for U.K.-based hospitality giant IHG Hotels & Resorts, which has its Americas office in Atlanta.
And, like poultry, hotel rooms have a shelf life. Sort of.
“What’s fascinating but also really challenging in the hotel business is we have a perishable product,” Balsley said. “If you don’t sell a room night, it goes away. You can’t sell that room night again.”
She loves “the underlying complexity of what it takes to … we talk about it as ‘putting heads in beds.’”
At the end of the day, she said, “It’s about creating the experiences and pricing and marketing decisions that inspire customers to choose our hotels.”
An 18-year IHG veteran, Balsley is focused on what spurs customers to stay at IHG properties, which include brands like Holiday Inn, Kimpton and InterContinental. The hospitality firm operates 80 properties in metro Atlanta and employs more than 1,400 people in its corporate office.
Growth path
Balsley had an eye on her goals early on while growing up in Philadelphia, where she watched her mother pursue a career in finance.
“Seeing how that motivated and inspired her at the time, and, importantly, how she balanced her professional career with supporting our family and always being present for me and my brother, was definitely an inspiration,” she said.
Balsley knew she wanted to go into business but attended Duke University — a college without an undergraduate business program — to play lacrosse. Instead, she studied economics and sociology, which she described as “the liberal arts version of an undergraduate business background.”
After earning a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard in 2006, Balsley joined IHG as vice president of strategy for the Americas. She has been with the hotel conglomerate ever since.
Beyond a love for travel, Balsley said she was drawn to “that experiential side of building brands in a business like hotels.”
Her current role, which she has held since March 2024, runs the gamut from marketing, loyalty, pricing and revenue to data, analytics and artificial intelligence.
“A typical day could include making decisions about what the coffee experience is going to be in a Holiday Inn Express, all the way through to how are we going to use analytics and propensity models to target the right customer with the right promotion to drive revenue for the business,” Balsley said. “Some days are super collaborative, working with colleagues all around the world. Others are deeply analytical, but that’s what I love about what I do. It’s very left brain, right brain.”
Pick your battles
Balsley admitted she might have been naive early in her career, thinking there weren’t challenges for women in the workforce.
“I learned later (about) the implicit bias of just how sometimes women who have strong points of view are perceived, or even sometimes women who are disagreeing with one another are perceived as challenging one another versus supporting one another,” she said.
Balsley credits former IHG executive Claire Bennett, who was her first female manager, as the leader who “helped me see you actually have a choice as a woman to be frustrated by bias or to actually embrace that it exists and not change who you are, but adapt your style based on the environment that you’re in.”
Balsley has learned “it’s picking your battles and sometimes challenging outside of the room versus in the room,” along with the value of persistence.
“That sentiment of sometimes, as women, you do need to push a bit harder for your voice to be heard, I think, is very true,” she added. “I’ve seen that in my career (as well as) being willing to champion for yourself. But I’ve also found having great mentors, male or female, can help you with what’s working and what’s not working.”
Her advice to those starting out in their careers begins with building breadth in their experience.
“Even if you love marketing and you love branding, work across a couple of different functional areas if you can,” Balsley said. “Ask for opportunities … to work on a project that stretches your perspective.”
She also recommends holding loosely to an overall vision for your career because “the journey has many different paths.” Balsley added, “The reality is the next role … sometimes it’s circumstance, sometimes it’s timing, and there’s always two or three different paths to get to where you want to go.”
That’s important to keep in mind because “sometimes people are so focused on the next job that they lose sight of, actually, there’s two or three interesting things I could do to get to where I ultimately want to be,” she said.
AJC Her+Story is a series in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighting women founders, creators, executives and professionals. It is about building a community. Know someone the AJC should feature in AJC Her+Story? Email us at herstory@ajc.com with your suggestions. Check out all of our AJC Her+Story coverage at ajc.com/herstory.
